Star.21: The £19 fitness tracker that aims to make you healthier in just 21 days

Even though we’ve all got arms full of fitness trackers, the Star.21 is a wearable with a difference. Not only does this basic band help you form healthy habits really slowly over 21 days (rather than throwing you in at the deep end like other wearables), it also costs just £19.

Launched on crowd-funding website Pozible earlier this week, the Star.21 has everything you’d expect from a fitness tracker, including a pedometer, calorie counter, sleep monitor, clock, alarm and a dashboard to view all of your data on in the form of the LifeBalanz app.

If you’re wondering why it’s called the Star.21 (it sounds like a tween magazine with free stickers glued to the front, right?), then that’s because it has 21 ‘star’ LEDs on the front to show you how close you are to hitting your goals.

The Star.21 team believes that the reason fitness trackers and health logging apps haven’t become mainstream yet is because people get bored of them and they’re so easy to stop using. To combat this problem, the idea behind Star.21 is that it takes 21 days of consistent activity to form a habit and after that it becomes second nature. So with Star.21 you set small, achievable goals and slowly work on them, which in theory will mean you’re much more likely to make a long-lasting, positive change to your health and fitness.

The challenges are divided up into three stages:

‘From Day 1 to 7, users require constant reminders to keep to their resolutions, the resulting behaviors are deliberate and unnatural. The initial novelty of wearing the fitness trackers allows users to overcome this period easily. ‘From Day 8 to 21, users require conscious control to steer away from urges and temptations; behaviors become deliberate but natural at this stage.‘From Day 22 to 91, users behaviors become unconscious and natural, users no longer require reminders and conscious control.’

The band provides a mixture of real-time monitoring, feedback, encouragement and (let’s face it) guilt-trips to help you stick to your goals and make being fit and healthy habitual.

The device itself looks a lot like similar products from the likes of Jawbone and Nike, but we do love the Star.21’s multi-faceted design, which makes it look a little more chic and a little less locker-band-you-need-to-wear-when-you-go-swimming, like many of the other less aesthetically-pleasing wearables on the market.

We’re not sure whether all this talk of slow progress and cultivating habits will turn out to be nothing more than marketing spiel, but it’s an interesting concept. We’re definitely noticing our enthusiasm for the latest wearable begins to wane after we’ve had it strapped to us for a few days, so maybe a slightly different approach is exactly what the fitness tracking market needs to attract long-lasting, mainstream interest.

For a pledge on Pozible of only £19 you can get your hands on a Star.21 and they’ll usually retail at around £55 when they hit stores.